From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
May 20
- 1570 - Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issues the first modern atlas.
- 1722 - Death of Sébastien Vaillant, French botanist (b. 1669)
- 1755 - Death of Johann Georg Gmelin, German naturalist and geographer (b. 1709)
- 1782 - Death of William Emerson, English mathematician (b. 1701)
- 1793 - Death of Charles Bonnet, Swiss naturalist (b. 1720)
- 1851 - Birth of Emile Berliner, German-born telephone and recording pioneer (d. 1929)
- 1860 - Birth of Eduard Buchner, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1917)
- 1891 - Thomas Alva Edison displays the first prototype kinetoscope.
- 1918 - Birth of Edward B. Lewis, American geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
- 1947 - Death of Philipp Lenard, Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1862)
- 1983 - First publications of the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS in the journal Science by Luc Montagnier
- 1996 - First naked eye observation of Comet Hale–Bopp
- 2002 - Death of Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist (b. 1941)
